The Ambria for Alderman campaign supports workers’ rights to organize for a better life, which is why we support the state-wide ballot referenda to recognize this right to organize with coworkers for better wages and working conditions.
This amendment will help raise the floor on wages, benefits, and working conditions by cracking down on union busting and banning “right to work” in the state of Illinois. “Right-to-work” laws originated in the 1940s as a strategy to maintain Jim Crow in the South, and divide and destroy labor power. “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans such as ‘right to work,’” Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1964. “It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions for everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer, and there are no civil rights.”
We must pick up on this legacy and ensure that we have a constitutional right to fight for better work.
Ambria became a CPS teacher in 2018 and was elected as the CTU Local 1 union delegate for her school building in 2020. She saw firsthand how working conditions impact teachers, teaching assistants, SECAs, custodians, nurses, bus drivers, lunchroom workers, security guards, and of course the children and families they all serve. She also saw that even with a strong union and a contract in hand, workers have to organize day in and day out to ensure that agreement is being followed. CTU Local 1 members organize for students with special needs to get the education they are legally owed by holding school administration accountable when Special Education teachers are pulled away to substitute teach. They organize to get school staff paid when CPS gives them a check that is short.
When workers organize, they improve their workplace and they improve the product of their labors. We must protect their right to do so. That right is under attack in Right to Work states - let’s make sure that doesn’t happen in Illinois.
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Learn more about the Workers' Rights Amendment here >